We headed toward my house. Halfway across the street, though, just as the light was changing, he unexpectedly shouted, “Excuse!”
Turning around, he dashed back into the deli. I tried to join him, but the ongoing traffic divided us. In another minute he was outside, smiling, jaywalking his way back to me.
“What was that about?” I asked.
He shook a box of bright red TicTacs. Slick Willy was planning on swapping spit. Well, just maybe we would. Once at my apartment, we climbed up the stairs until we reached the roof door. We opened up the rusty bolt and stepped onto the tarblackness. Carefully we steered around skylights, rusty pipes, and filthy brick chimneys. Sako grabbed my hand and took the liberty of climbing onto an adjacent rooftop, where we took a seat on a low brick wall and stared at the distant mountain peaks of skyscrapers and nearby valleys of tenement rooftops.
He opened both our beers and handed me one. I only took a sip and instantly felt woozy. Although the conversation was a bit halting, we drank our beer and contemplated the gorgeous lightscape of the city’s skyline. Sako’s slippery hands quickly got twined into my hair like bats. Before I knew it, Sako was massaging my arms and neck. I was bigger and stronger than Sako and didn’t feel threatened by him as I did with Alphonso. He also seemed sane, so I let him get away with a lot more. When I leaned against a chimney stack, he chivalrously placed his jacket around my shoulders so I wouldn’t get all cinder-filthy.
I didn’t know if it was one of the secrets of the Orient, but the guy really got into the Zen of massage. I felt like a small car being tuned up, getting my oil replaced and my wheels rebalanced. His magical hands reached into the muscles along my ribs and upper chest, where he seemed to clean the bones and put them back. When he rubbed my breasts, it was so casual and nonerogenous that I wasn’t even aware he stole second base.
Primo gave a fair rubdown, but he didn’t come close to this dear little man. And just when I thought he was done, Sako unlaced my kickers and went to work on my feet. This turned out to be the most electric and exultant part of the workout.
I think he actually had a secret form of communication with each part of my foot: the sole, the instep, the heel, the arch, and each toe. Every member of the foot family wanted a different sensation, and only he knew that feeling—he became one with it. The mounting ecstasy compelled a minor out-of-foot experience. Finally, urgently, I reached over with both hands and grabbed his tight little buns, pulling him up against me. Soon, when his lips clipped over mine, his TicTac-tasty tongue tingled in my palate. I found myself kissing him without effort. I don’t know quite how it happened, but at some point we floated down the airshaft and into my apartment. Only Numb broke the spell by leaping up on Sako with his body outstretched. The dog was almost as tall as him. I pulled the pooch off and stuck him in the bathroom. Unlike Alphonso, he didn’t even have to ask. If Caroline was in her room, I didn’t hear her.
We slipped into the bedroom and resumed our lip wrestle. Sako wasn’t a great kisser, but what he lacked in tongue-flickability, he made up for in sheer tongue-mopping. The man outlicked Numb. His pointy red swab voyaged its way down the cresting waves of my neck, navigating through the straits of my breasts, whirlpooling forever along the flat of my stomach. His hands pulled down my pants, attempting to explore my Cape of Good Hope, but it wasn’t that easy, I held on to my panty elastic like a life preserver. I could feel his open mouth exhale over the sheer fabric of my panties, into my parted crotch. Finally he bypassed my bastion of neglect, sliding his lips down my legs, pausing on his real port of entry. His catlike tongue swam along the twists of my right ankle and lashed out and down my Achilles’ heel. There he stopped for a moment, breathing heavily. With a jolt, I bolted up. He was sucking my toes. I never imagined they were so sensitive.
Over the next few minutes, his tongue pumiced the callous of my heels, pedicured my hoof-like nails, and cleaned the jam between my toes. Then, his sweet mouth opened and he deep-jawed me. Looking down, I felt as though I were being swallowed by a python: he had about half of my size-eight foot down his expanding throat. I could also see he was rubbing himself over his pants.
He truly brought some exotic dishes to the erotic table. His mouth worked its way up; this time he tore my panties off like they were fastened by Velcro strips. But I didn’t mind. His carnal credentials were in order. His tenacious little tongue went right to work, starting on the bristled periphery before going in for the kill. When his pants and boxers dropped off, and I could see his ruddy thing throbbing out like a large baby’s pacifier, I called foul.
“What’s the matter, Mary?” he asked innocently.
“Protection.”
Out came a pack of condoms—Rough Riders—and I realized that that was what this Far Eastern Lothario had hastily purchased along with the TicTacs. He slipped a glove on, and then I did what I always swore I’d never do (but occasionally did)—had sex on the first goddamned date.
Unfortunately, that’s when things started quickly becoming undone. He kamikazed almost as soon as he entered, screaming like Godzilla as he did so. Next he bounced up and down on the bed like some pint-size Tarzan. Spotting the half-finished bottle of Jack Daniels sticking out of one of Primo’s banana boxes, he snatched it, unscrewed the top, and took a monster gulp. Then naked, as though doing some victory dance, he threw on the radio, and started bobbing and drinking to the music, his rhubarb flipping up and down under its spiky tuft of pubic hair. A few moments later, he was tuckered out.
“May I see your shoes?” he asked after a brief rest.
I pointed to my closet, and wondered how I was going to get rid of him and back to my writing. I watched him squatting over my dozen or so shoes, looking deeply into them, touching the leather uppers, sniffing the Vibram lowers, checking out the manufacturer labels like a boy fussing over baseball cards. Finally, he sighed over my two pairs of campy high heels.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but—” I said, wanting him the hell out.
He didn’t even notice me as I started panicking about his intrusion in my closet space. When I opened the bathroom door, Numb darted out and into the bedlam of the bedroom. I had gargled and showered as I wondered how I was going to flush this man, when to my surprise, I heard him scream, “Help me, Mary!”
I raced in to see him standing on the bed, terrified, holding one of my pumps in one hand and the bottle of Jack in the other. Numb, who had sniffed him, was now upon him, licking his sushi roll.
“Oh my!” He folded down from his freshly opened umbrella of drunkenness. I grabbed Numb by the collar and held him.
“Bad dog,” I said to the both of them. “You can take the bottle, but I have to write.”
“Yes, yes.” He rose and started pulling on his pants and shirt. I waited patiently with the dog by the front door.
“I hope this was not too sudden,” he said, probably quoting a line from the script of Pretty in Pink.
“Not at all, you were great.” Which must have been a line from Some Kind of Wonderful.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said, pulling on his shoes. I opened the front door. Before he could tie them, he staggered out, still holding my old pump and bottle. I grabbed the shoe and gave him his jacket as he passed into the unpainted, unswept hallway.
“Good night,” I said, after I closed the door behind him.
chapter 15
I dashed to the computer, turned it on, and began hammering out my much-delayed story. After a few pages, though, I found my thoughts drifting and my eyelids drooping. I considered buying a cup of coffee but elected instead to take a short nap. The day of work, band practice, and then the sexual escapade had flattened me out. I needed a juiced-up brain to crank out work of any grade.
I awoke eight hours later, feeling refreshed but panicky. Aside from the fact that I was supposed to hop up and pull an eight-hour shift at Kinko’s, I had to finish and hand off my collection to Tattoo Man, and be wide awake for our big performance at Mercury Lounge tonight
—it was all too much.
My first act of the day was to call work and politely explain that I was sick and would not be able to come in. I felt guilty about it, and Scotty, the model of innocence for my Bartleby story, gingerly insinuated his despair with comments like “Jeff isn’t going to take this well.”
“Don’t worry about Jeff.”
He added that he was short-handed, and to my surprise, Scotty asked me the symptoms of my infirmities. He wasn’t as innocent as he seemed.
“Runny nose, sore throat, fever—the usual.” I said without even making an effort at sounding sick.
He concluded with, “If you have a sudden relapse of health, please come in.”
I assured him I would and hung up. I washed, coffeed, and plopped back down in front of Mister Computer. I decided to narrate the story through the eyes of his female supervisor, Kristin. She is a young punk who is transferred to manage a new Kinko’s. She hires Bart on the first day of work. He quickly excels, proving himself to be the best worker, laboring hard and efficiently over the years, refusing promotions, never loafing, never missing a day of work, never even asserting a personality—just staying on as a clerk as others more temperamental and less productive pass through. Bart has found his niche; this is the pinnacle for him. He can Xerox faster and more politely than any other employee, juggling several Xeroxing jobs at once. Over the years, though, the machines get increasingly sophisticated. The punk manager loses her fashion statements as she gets older and watches as the latest trends and vogues come and go across the canvas of the younger generations. She fondly remembers her own years of flamboyance and abandonment. After twenty years or so, technology finally advances so that all copy machines are fully automated. All patrons have to do is set down their originals, verbally make their specifications, and slip their credit card—which everyone has—into the automated contraptions. Bart, the last customer service employee in the place, only has to oversee the process and occasionally explain it to those who fail the intelligence test of being able to perform the obvious.
On that first day of total automation, Bart just sits back, with little to do. However, over the next few weeks, the state-of-the-art equipment mysteriously starts breaking down. He has to do the copies by hand. His manager, Kristin, brings in experts to repair the problem. But a few days later, to her horror, she finds that all the machines are down again. After weeks of the machines repeatedly malfunctioning and needing to be repaired, Kristin installs a hidden video camera. To her dismay, she discovers that her lone employee is the culprit.
“Bart,” she confronts him, “why have you been sabotaging the equipment?”
“Actually, I repaired them,” he explains blandly.
“How’s that?”
“They are designed to help us, not replace us.”
“They are helping us. Freeing us to do bigger and better things.”
“What happens when there’s nothing bigger and better?” he asks.
“I assure you there are greater purposes in life than Xeroxing. In any case, you have to promise me you won’t tamper with the machines again.”
“I prefer not to,” Bart responded.
She threatens to fire him, but he continues his rage against the machines. Kristin, who has known Bart over thirty years of working together, tries to protect him and conceal his Luddite compulsion from her district manager. But her boss, who has grown concerned over this recurrent problem, has hidden his own video camera, and he soon discovers what is going on. He not only fires the clerk but has him arrested for squandering thousands of dollars of the company’s money on costly repairs. Bart is taken to the correctional facility downtown to await arraignment. When Kristin goes to visit him, she finds that he has died sleeping in his cell.
“Sleeping with copiers and Kinko employees of years gone by,” she concludes sadly. This alludes to the last line of the Melville story.
“Bart the Xeroxer” was the last story in The Book of Jobs. The order of the stories was “Big Mac,” about the McDonald’s cashier in Harlem; “The Melting of an Empire,” the Baskin Bobbins suicide; “The Biggest Gap,” the love story between two vapid Gap employees; “Kmart to Chaos,” about Kay, the unfortunate sales associate; and “The Coffee Wars,” about the zealous manager of a new coffee franchise who personally combats the managers of neighboring coffee franchises. On the screen the collection came to 182 pages. According to the word count, it squeaked in at just over fifty-two thousand words.
By noon, I was barely able to read another word; the mental fuel was draining from my eyes. I strained the entire mess through the meat grinder of spell-check. That took another hour and a half. Foolishly, I attempted to reread the entire monstrosity one last time just to give it a final syntactical check. Sleep felled me somewhere around sixty pages into it.
Within minutes of my slumber, the phone tortured me, ringing me from rest. It was Howard.
“Are your stories ready?”
“Is it five already?” I said, trying to sound wide awake, and stumbled into my commander chair in front of my cyber-universe.
“It’s three o’clock, and I have to drop off the manuscripts in forty-five minutes. I’ll swing by your house.”
“Did you walk Fedora?” I asked as I went to the top of the document and punched the formatting functions.
“Walked him hours ago. Why?” he replied.
“What’s it like owning a Weimaraner?” I set the running heads of the manuscript.
“They’re sensitive, smart, soulful dogs,” he alliterated.
“They have those tired-looking eyes.” I put in the font and letter sizes, then centered page numbers. “They look sickly.”
“Don’t let William Wegman hear you say that,” he cautioned.
“Who’s that?” I asked, knowing perfectly well who he was.
“He’s the artist that uses his Weimaraners in all his photographs, and he goes to the local dogrun sometimes.” I checked to make sure all the opening pages of the different stories were four lines below the title.
“Okay,” I muttered as I pushed the print key.
“See you in forty-five minutes,” he stated.
“An hour,” I pleaded. “I need at least an hour to get myself pretty.” It would take at least that long for my printer to finish the hundred and eighty-two pages.
“In exactly one hour I’ll ring your bell.” He spoke like a warden declaring when he would throw the switch. As the printer methodically printed, I threw on a slip, brushed my teeth, and gargled. Out of nervousness, while watching as the pages spat out of the machine, I applied makeup.
In half an hour, only ninety-four pages were done. It was still printing. At forty-five minutes, it was up to one hundred and thirty-eight pages! I started pacing. The lovable mongrel, sensing I was tense and not wanting to incur some of my misaimed anxiety, slipped out of the room. I prayed that incredibly Tattooed Man would be incredibly late.
Five minutes before he was supposed to arrive, the doorbell rang. I intercommed down, coyly asking who it was.
“Me,” he shouted back, “and I have to be at the office in twenty minutes. Bring it right down.”
I checked the printer; it was up to page one hundred and sixty-two. Those last twenty pages were going to take at least another twenty minutes. I stood over the prehistoric printer, begging it to move faster, freaking out with every new page.
About five minutes later, the doorbell buzzed again. I pushed the intercom, and told him I was running a little late.
“I’m sorry, Mary, but I just can’t wait any longer.”
“I’m on my way down.” The printer was only on page one hundred and seventy. It seemed to be slowing down. I dashed downstairs in bare feet with just my slip on. He stood in the doorway, sporting a brown knapsack, looking at his watch.
“Where’s the tome?” he asked. “Where are your clothes?”
“Owwww!” I said, having stepped on something cold and pointy.
“What’s the mat
ter?”
When I leaned forward to look at my foot, he asked, “Is it your back?”
“Yes,” I replied, adding that while playing tennis at East River Park, my back had gone out. With my other foot I stepped on something soft and wet.
“You should have said so,” he replied sympathetically. “I give great back massages.”
As he followed me up the stairs, I limped like a penguin pretending to have a back injury. As I led him into the living room, I could hear the printer whirring in the next room. Willing to do anything to bide my time, I lay down on the sofa and hoped he was half the masseur slick Sako had been.
“Not there!” he yelled. “Get on the floor.”
“But it’s more comfortable here,” I said from the couch.
“Just trust me.”
I spread out a towel and lay down on the living room floor. Numb came over and sniffed me mockingly. Tattoo Man took off his shoes like a Tibetan monk and came over. His hands gently moved down the Himalayan ridges of my shoulders.
“Exactly where is the pain?”
“Lower center.”
With a mystical quality he ran his hands lightly along my vertebrae.
“Lower,” I instructed.
Through the silken fabric, his fingers felt cold and clammy. When they finally landed on my buttocks, I yelled, “Up!”
He moved the heel of his mucilaginous palm up along my slip in a sort of gentle twisting motion.
“That feels good,” I said as he did it.
“No,” he stopped. “This isn’t working.”
“It’s working great,” I replied. “The pain is going away.”
“Sit up a moment.” I sat up. Without even asking, he took the strings of my slip and was about to bring them down over my shoulders.
“What are you doing?” I grabbed them just before he could bare my breasts to all the roaches in my apartment.
Dogrun Page 17